1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed generally to determining machine storage capacity requirements. In particular, the present invention relates to effective management of future storage capacity needs by tracking current and historical usage and utilization, facilitating a better understanding of existing storage usage and utilization, and enabling scenario planning for prediction of future storage requirements.
2. Description of the Related Art
Storage usage in general is growing, and growing rapidly. Applications of all types consume ever-increasing amounts of storage, and the consequences of running out of storage—room for an application to store data—can be catastrophic. At a minimum the application will cease providing some of its functions. In a severe case the application will fail, which may, in turn, cause the associated business functions to fail. Thus, businesses are forced to continually add storage and maintain a safety margin. Yet the costs for storage must be taken into account—additional storage implies additional dollars. A challenge, therefore, is to effectively balance the need for more storage with the need to control costs.
Conventional storage management tools provide a picture of current capacity—what storage is available now, and are there any problems, as defined by user policies, that exist at the moment. Some of these tools may also provide historical logs of the data. These are, by and large, reporting tools, with pre-determined analysis capabilities. They typically collect information through the use of invasive software or other methods that must be permanently loaded on the systems from which the tool collects information. This collected information may be applied against standard or user-defined policies to provide indications of issues or problems that already exist. A user is typically not provided with specific, actionable data that indicates the types of actions that might be required, today, to prevent storage capacity problems in the future.
One conventional approach is the use of basic enterprise management tools such as Unicenter by CA; Tivoli by IBM; and OpenView by Hewlett Packard. While the information gathered by these tools may be broad, they are basic monitoring and reporting tools, limited to providing information about current needs and data.
Another approach involves storage resource management tools, which are narrower in scope than the general enterprise management tools. They provide some basic storage management capabilities, e.g. provisioning, but again, are limited to providing a view of current data only.
Network and processor capacity tools are an additional category of conventional tools in current usage. While they provide capacity information, they are specific to processor and/or network performance and, again, are limited to a current view.
In addition, conventional approaches lack flexible association mechanisms. Current tools enforce pre-defined views of the elements being managed. There is no method by which a user can group or associate items to facilitate additional planning and action.
Current tools provide a fixed set of query capabilities that restrict a user to gaining only the level of understanding that the tool supports. There is a very limited ability, if any, for the user to freely query the tools data to gain information or analysis that is meaningful. Their information basis is limited to technological data and does not take into account business metrics.
Thus, there is a need for an easy-to-use tool that provides users with query-able access to current, historical and predicted data as well as strong analysis and forecasting capabilities, and which is adaptable to specific business metrics.